Life Around Technology

Kevin Hoyt from Adobe and Sam Stokes from Microsoft will have a debates on technologies, platforms and future today, 12 February 2009, 7:00 PM (PST/GMT +8), in the Bronco Student Center (Ursa Minor) at California State Polytechnic University in Pomona. Microsoft and Adobe will demonstrate their evidences of domination. Adobe, who gave the world Photoshop, Flash, Flex, Dreamweaver and AfterEffects, engage developers to create cross-platform media prodigies online as well as a desktop applications, being able to run with or without the internet connection, which is possible with Adobe Integrated Runtime, or just AIR. Microsoft gives developers the opportunity of creation online applications which are full of media and animation with Silverlight and power of C#. Interesting.

Debates will be translated online in two options:

For users who have got a mid-bandwidth channel, higher quality.

For users with low-bandwidth, lower quality.

At the moment, a nice ballet is translated there, with interruptions sometimes.

By the way, Kevin Hoyt recently published an useful AIR application with sources, which itself is a set of 75 samples of JavaScript AIR applications with centralized launch interface. It worth looking inside, especially when you know how much power is in the JavaScript frameworks like ExtJS, which embraces the AIR too.

Update: due to work reason, author temporarily removed the video from net, but promised to put it back in a week. Please be patient.
Do you remember “Capital” music video? Meet the new work from its author. Aliaksei Tserakhaumade animation for Lyapis Trubetskoy “Lights” song:

Lyapis Trubetskoy “Lights” from Aliaksei Tserakhau on Vimeo.

BTW, the “Lights” music video won the first prize in the nomination “Best Animation” of Portugal VIMUS International Music Video Festival. Its competitors were Chemical Brothers “Salmon dance” by Dom & Nic, Bjork, “Declare Independence” by Michele Gondri, and Temposhark “Blame” by Motomichi Nakamura.

Just after the nomination, Aliaksei promised to put the video online to let everybody see it, and today he did it.

The most pleasure of my whole computer and web life I’ve got working with your products. Also, I made some money from it and growing. Also, I’ve got a second family, our user group where people do support each other, it’s growing too. Thank you for making all this smart and alive web better, thank you for putting your efforts, keeping high standards, being valiantly innovative and having balance between two abovementioned.

Ted Patrick just shared some info on his new “Hyperdrive” project which is a hosted video service for AdobeTV and Adobe Media Player, or just AMP.

This video project is for contain app demos, tutorials and conference sessions created by community. Anyone can upload his stuff and share with others.

To start with Hyperdrive, Ted uploaded the complete set of full San Jose 360|Flex Sessions recordings, so anyone can see them through the AMP now. All videos are High Definition 1024×768 ones. At the moment, 5 sessions are available:

BuzzWord + ConnectNow + 5GB Shared for me at Acrobat.com – it was the happy very first day of Summer’08.It seems like I’ve just thought about something like it and now it’s here. Actually, I was only thirsty for using Connect as replacement for my teleconferencing with clients, but Adobe, it looks like you read my thoughts in advance on almost everything regarding online collaboration and documentation. Regarding ADs, I like how it is explained:

“…about whether we are going to put advertising in Acrobat.com. In short, that is not our plan today. Adobe has built a great business selling software, and we plan to continue to do so with software as a service via Acrobat.com.”

I tend to call it Parallel People Workflow, which is hardly only a technical, but motivational issue too: as I remember, it is usually easier to proceed with the document when you know you are not alone. Maybe it’s just my laziness, but then other people probably got it too.

This works like magic – now Flash Developers can easily create AIR applications on their own. Lee Brimelow appeared in the Adobe TV show where he has shown the process of creation of the simple AIR application using solely Adobe Flash CS3 IDE. So, here’s the full recording of this show:

Short and useful tutorial. I just emphasize the moment of enabling AIR development in your copy of Flash CS3 IDE. In order to get the full pack of joy, you just have to make sure that you have installed all necessary updates from Adobe in the following order (sequence can’t be changed: each next item strongly depends on the previous one):

Adobe Flash Player Update for Flash CS3 Professional (9.0.2)

Adobe AIR Update for Flash CS3 Professional (9.0.3)

Adobe Air 1.1 Update for Flash CS3 Professional

After installing these updates you’ll get the full AIR features including multilingual applications support. In the ‘Create New’ section of the Welcome Screen, you’ll see a new item named ‘Flash File (Adobe AIR). In Commands menu, two new items will appear:

Flash Player Engineer Tinic Uro explains, why it is impossible to fix the broken SOUND_COMPLETE behavior in Flash Player 10. And why it even become worse in FP10 (well, it is possible to fix, but considered b@d_EnGiNeeRinG. I’m at the Tinic side here).

And generally saying, there’s no ‘cool’ solution in Astro for this problem. As Tinic said, it will be resolved in next major release, Flash Player 11.

But! In FP10 the new sound model is available. First, it allows long-awaited Dynamic Sound Generation feature. And now you can choose balance between performance and latency of sound generation in your app using a new “samplesCallback” event of the Sound object.

Here’s the explanation and code samples of the new sound model in Flash Player 10 from Tinic Uro.

And finally, third one of the Tinic’s article set on new Sound features in FP10 explains the different sound sources possible in this release.

If you are a Game Maker, and still not completely sure about how to sell your game(s), then following short article from Lorenz Games is for you: How to Get a Sponsorship with a Flash Game.

It is about how to make your offer to the game portals aside from the slow Flash Game License Bids, including a list of available resources with direct email links for faster communication (recommended by Lorenz), tips on composing email with the offer and important step of choosing the right game license (exclusive or non-exclusive).

Overall, this post may be useful even if you are not making flash games right now. Maybe you will decide to try out this way of monetizing your work after figuring out that Huge Flash Games Industry

Ashwin Mathew made an online presentation dedicated to developing AJAX Applications in ColdFusion 8 (it was 21st May 2008 at the Bay Area ColdFusion User Group). You can see the full Adobe Connect recording complete with chat and other Connect features here: ColdFusion 8 AJAX by Ashwin Mathew.

Also, there’s article in the Adobe Developer center with an overview of Ajax features in ColdFusion 8.

To get even deeper with this subject, you may want to read Flex 3 vs ColdFusion 8 Ajax article by Dale Fraser. He compares different UI features available in Flex 3 and ColdFusion 8 AJAX, and makes his verdict about pros and cons of both approaches.

Here’s the promised update: Google 3D Maps Adobe AIR Application, version 0.5. The main subject of this update is to target the Release Version of the Adobe AIR Runtime – you’ll need it to run this app. Sorry for this long delay.Download Google 3D Maps Adobe AIR App v0.5, source flies (and bugs) are included

About Google 3D Maps on Air: This app utilizes the Papervision3D engine, Google Maps and Adobe AIR HTML component to create the interactive planar and spherical maps from html pages loaded from Google Maps.

Actually, it can operate at any other web page in the same way. Now I’m going to implement the same functionality within Adobe Flex, it just became possible because of recently released the Google Maps API for Flash.

Would you like to access Google APIs and services from your RIA-application? If you would, you would also like to vote for this feature request: Add crossdomain.xml for Google Accounts.

To vote, just click the star icon to the right from “Issue 406:” text. You also may write a comment if you wish (this is optional; but voting for crossdomain feature is mandatory!

Please: do not comment with “+1″-like phrases. It makes comment feed useless for those who really interested in reading it (yes, I know such people). And I guess “+1″ commenting techniques will only make that Google employee who makes the decision about taking this issue into consideration think it is not very important issue just because it is supported only by strange crowd of noobs.

Adobe made a great step forward and opened its JIRA for voting for Flash Player related bugs, feature requests and other issues. Actually, you can submit your own bug to the JIRA, but it is very and only good practice to browse the bugs database first and make sure you aren’t going to clone some other’s bug using your own interpretation. That’s why it is usually said in uppercase that you can VOTE for bugs, and then in lowercase said that you can add your own too. But you can. Both options are cool ones ??� let’s just use them in right way.

It is Justin Everett-Church who told us about this new Adobe JIRA Flash Player section.

Just for the record ??� there are also ASC (compiler) and whole Flex SDK sections in Adobe JIRA.

I guess you played a lot of games, sophisticated too. But you probably never played this one. Literally speaking, “Polcarstva.net” is a simple quest game. There’s no 3D, no social features, no user registration or something web20 either. But it seems there’s a heart in the game. And there’s… there’s the flash in this piece of art, created by Denis Stepkin. Click to play:

Maybe you’ll want to sign to it up too: Adobe RIA newsletter with info on Adobe RIA technologies and software updates, including Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR.

Not very long description, but let’s see what it will be. At least, it is useful to get information from its source and get it fast (pretend to get it first). I wonder to see this RIA newsletter and compare this new source of information to Adobe Edge, which is pretty cool one.

BTW, there’s official Blog of www.UseAdobe.com which usually tells such good news like this one and like, you know, Adobe AIR for Linux and ways of promoting Flex Applications.

I was writing about Alternativa Game project from their very beginning for some time, trying to depict the growth of great project with talented people behind it.

The most recent news about this development are the coolest too: Alternativa Game becomes Alternativa Platform. This happened nearly a month after their meeting with Oddcast, a well-known company in the avatar platforms world. Please find details in the Alternativa blog:

We did it. First official meeting of UAFPUG in Kharkiv, Ukraine, 15 March 2008.
Please read the brief reports with a pair of photos from Andriy ‘JabbyPanda’ Panas and Sergey Kovalev (in English ) Also, there’s some are nice photos of Kharkiv and meeting from Denis ‘mrJazz’ Sheremetov and Roman ‘NoubaSE’ Shuper.

There were 3 speeches at all: “Event Model In AS3″ by Eldar Prilutsky, “FMS2 & What’s New In FMS3″ by Denis Papazoff and “Using PureMVC Framework In The Development Of Map Application” by Rostislav Siryk (it’s me).

I was very happy to host this first meeting in the office of my company, GlobalLogic (ex-Validio Ukraine). A lot of respect to our VP of Software Development Yury Landgraf who very kindly responded to this idea, and to Anastasia Logvinova from our HR department — she helped me a lot regarding organization. And respect for everyone of 45 developers who was there!

As UAFPUG, we’re having the next meeting 15 March, 2008 in Kharkiv (with some sponsorship of my company ????? GlobablLogic Ukraine). There’s 31 members registered already to participate in this meeting and no less than 4 speeches are being prepared.